Proportional Electoral College Votes
For many decades there has been public criticism of the Electoral College and how states award the votes. Currently there is some emphasis on electing the President of the United States (POTUS) via national popular vote which would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. To avoid the amendment process some states have formed a coalition named the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) to elect the President. Their major complaint is that in a winner-takes-all system candidates pay much more attention to the swing states than to states that have a strong Democratic or Republican majority. My complaints with the NPVIC is that it is an end run around the Constitution and still doesn’t make every vote count because it maintains the winner-takes-all system.
The past few years I have favored the congressional district electoral vote (EV) allocation system implemented by Maine and Nebraska — two EVs are allocated to the statewide popular vote winner and one EV is allocated to the congressional district popular vote winner. It seemed like a reasonable compromise between the current process and a national popular vote amendment.
This month I happened on an article written by University of Vermont adjunct associate professor, Edward McMahon, published in the February 3 edition of The Fulcrum News titled “Lurking in basic math, not House districts, is the best Electoral College reform“. According to McMahon:
“A much better approach would be for the state to award electors based on the overall split in the popular vote — 60 percent of the ballots translating to three-fifths of the electors, say, or as close to that as possible. Proportional solutions have been proposed many times in the country’s history, and in 1950 the Senate passed such a proposal with more than a two-thirds majority.
In the Wisconsin context, the Legislature could opt to award all electors proportionally, probably yielding a 5–5 split in most elections. Alternatively, they could use the proportional system but also include the element of Tauchen’s proposal giving a two-elector bonus to the statewide winner — which could help keep Wisconsin on the list of presidential battlegrounds.”
I prefer the latter and from now on will promote state popular vote proportional Electoral Vote allocation. I encourage all states to consider the method.
